Re: FW: RFC1982 on Serial Number Arithmetic

Rohit Khare (khare@w3.org)
Tue, 3 Sep 1996 16:12:55 -0400 (EDT)


I also liked:

The serial number in the DNS SOA Resource Record is a Serial Number
as defined above, with SERIAL_BITS being 32. That is, the serial
number is a non negative integer with values taken from the range
[0 .. 4294967295]. That is, a 32 bit unsigned integer.

The maximum defined increment is 2147483647 (2^31 - 1).

Care should be taken that the serial number not be incremented, in
one or more steps, by more than this maximum within the period given
by the value of SOA.expire. Doing so may leave some secondary
servers with out of date copies of the zone, but with a serial number
"greater" than that of the primary server.

It's this kind of short-sighted thinking that's preventing the IP and
DNS protocols from using subspace warp bands for interplanetary networking...
what a crock! I mean, I can't even send IP packets to Gallileo because the light
delay to Jupiter is > MSS (255 seconds, the maximum packet lifeltime). Now this?I, mean, I can't update DNS root zone transfers more than a few thousand times
a second? Pshaw....

RK

:-)